Publications

Publication details [#63421]

Paradis, Johanne, Jia Ruiting and Arppe Antti. 2017. The acquisition of tense morphology over time by English second language children with specific language impairment: Testing the cumulative effects hypothesis. Applied Psycholinguistics 38 (4) : 881–908.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Cambridge University Press

Annotation

The cumulative effects hypothesis (CEH) asserts that bilingual evolution would be a challenge for children with specific language impairment (SLI). To date, inquiry on second language (L2) children with SLI has been restricted mostly to their early years of L2 exposure; however, exploring the long-term outcomes of L2 children with SLI is crucial for testing the CEH. Accordingly, this inquiry explored production and grammaticality judgments of English tense morphology from matched groups of L2 children with SLI and L2 children with typical development (TD) for 3 years, from ages 8 to 10 with 4–6 years of exposure to English. This inquiry found that the longitudinal acquisition profile of the L2 children with SLI and TD was similar to the acquisition profile reported for monolinguals with SLI and TD. Farther, L2-SLI children's precision with tense morphology was similar to that of their monolingual age peers with SLI at the end of the inquiry, and surpassed that of younger monolingual peers with SLI whose age matched the L2 children's length of exposure to English. These findings are not consistent with the CEH, but instead display that morphological acquisition parallel to monolinguals with SLI is possible for L2 children with SLI.